Rising energy prices coupled with surging profits for oil giants BP and Shell receive plenty of coverage and make the lead story for the Independent. As ever, the question of windfall taxes crops up, after BP and Shell raked in the dosh (combined profits of £7.2bn).

In its leader, the Independent comes down against such a move on the grounds that ministers would look as if they were punishing oil companies while benefiting themselves, in the form of greater VAT revenue on fuel.

Alex Brummer, the Mail's City editor, does favour windfall taxes as long as the cash is used to cut fuel duty, but he sees little likelihood of such a move because the government wants to be seen as pro-environment. The Independent's economics commentator, Hamish McRae, acknowledges the threat to the poor from high oil and food prices, but hopes that oil prices do not come down too much. "The market mechanism can be a brutal one, but it can also be a powerful one, forcing a necessary change in the way we live on our planet home."

As the world feels the squeeze from higher prices all round, the International Herald Tribune carries a front-page story on middle-class worries. "Across Europe, people in the middle layer of the labour force - from office workers, civil servants and skilled labourers to low-level managers - are coping with a growing sense that they are being pushed to the margins like never before," says the IHT, which rather undermines its thesis with the caveat that the middle class in Europe is "still more prosperous than the disturbingly large group of citizens who are at risk from poverty".

Motorists will not be pleased by the splash in the Times, which reveals that tens of thousands of families will have to pay up to £245 extra a year under a "covert" Treasury decision to raise road tax for owners of larger cars bought since March 2001.

We can blame bankers for our problems, well partly anyway. Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, did so yesterday when he launched an "extraordinary" attack on excessive pay packages and heavy risk-taking. The Times quotes him: "Banks have come to realise in the recent crisis that they are paying the price for having designed compensation packages which provide incentives that are not, in the long run, in the interests of the banks themselves." Or us, he may well have added.

Details of the incarceration of Elizabeth Fritzl by her father Josef, continue to pour out from Austria. Psychiatrists yesterday watched nervously as the siblings that had been kept in the cellar, met those that had been kept upstairs for the first time - all of the children came from the incestuous relationship between father and daughter. "It was astonishing how easy and natural this first encounter," an official is quoted in the Times.

But for the children kept downstairs, their emergence into the world for the first time was unsettling. "Later on that evening, we had to drive them to hospital. We had to drive them very slowly with them because they cringed at every car light and every bump. It was as if we had just landed on the moon," said another official, quoted in the Independent.

As the investigation into how Josef Fritzl maintained his secret parallel life underground - complete with a 300kg steel remote-controlled door, the Guardian reports that it was not unusual for homes in Lower Austria to have bunker-like steel doors because the region had been on the edge of the iron curtain and the threat of nuclear war was considered to be genuine.

Times columnist Alice Miles does not think the Fritzl case is particularly Austrian and cites cases of wickedness in Britain from that of the murdering doctor, Harold Shipman, and Victoria Climbié, the child who was treated abominably before she died.

The repercussions of the world's worst industrial disaster in India 23 years ago are still very much with us, as Randeep Ramesh reports for the Guardian. Campaigners say hundreds of children are still being born with defects as a result of the toxic gas released after an explosion at a pesticide plant, owned by the US multinational Union Carbide, which killed 5,000 people. The Indian government stopped all research on the medical effects of the gas 14 years ago without explanation and more than 100,000 children of victims remain without insurance, despite an order from India's supreme court.

After last night's screening of a documentary of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann this time last year, the Mail's headline will make uncomfortable reading for Madeline's mother: Where were you that night, Kate? Mail columnist Allison Pearson wonders at the point of the documentary at all. Do the two doctors really deserve two whole hours of prime time when so many other kids are lost and thousands are dying in Zimbabwe, she asks. "There comes a point when we have to ask whether any of this is going to help bring Madeleine back."

Michel Houellebecq, the bestselling French novelist, author of Atomised, is at the receiving end of a vitriolic attack not from his critics but from his mother, Lucie Ceccaldi, in her own book. You could write this story by just stringing mummy's quotes together. Here's just one from the Times' account: "My son, he can f*** off wherever he wants, because I don't give a stuff about him. But if he has the misfortune to stick my name in one of his things one more time, he's going to get hit in the gob with a walking stick and that'll knock all this teeth out, that's for sure."

The back pages heap praise on Paul Scholes for his thunderous goal last night against Barcelona, to set up a Champions League final against either Chelsea or Liverpool, who play tonight. The Star says the "internet went into Moscow meltdown" as football fans sought tickets for the big match.